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Art & Nature Through the Lens

On July 30, Photo Center NW and the Seattle Art Museum teamed up to offer a one day workshop titled Rethinking Art & Nature Through the Lens with Seattle based artist (and Photo Center Certificate Program Alumna) Laurel Schultz.

After viewing works in the SAM exhibitions Beauty & Bounty and Reclaimed, participants made their way to the Olympic Sculpture Park to realize some of their own contemporary views of art and nature. Below is a slideshow of some of their work from the workshop.

Laurel had this to say about leading this great workshop at SAM:

“Art and Nature Through the Lens, a one-day exhibition tour, slide talk, and photographic outing (which was greatly enhanced by the cooperation of the weather gods) made for a great Saturday. We met up at SAM and paid a visit to Beauty and Bounty, a generous survey of landscape painting and photography of the West and Pacific Northwest covering everything from the high-drama sentiment-drenched landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt to the low-key lyricism of photography by Eirik Johnson, and many points in between. I gave a brief slide talk on some photographers whose work addresses our relationship with the natural world, and then we decamped to the Olympic Sculpture Park for our art safari. One common reason many of the photographers had for participating in the workshop was a desire to break out of the photographic habit of, as one person put it, “taking the same picture in a hundred different places.” We started out at the base of Roxy Paine’s full-sized, stainless steel tree where people took photographs not only of the tree from every imaginable angle, but the us, ourselves, in knee-high grass, taking photographs of a metal tree. It was a good start. It only got more interesting from there. The proof is in the range of different photographs (and paintings!) that participants created from the experience. Thanks PCNW and SAM for dreaming up and breathing life into this adventure.”
–Laurel Schultz